Hundreds of different designs, any color, size, or product you could wish for, Shein has it at the click of a button. This utopian marketplace is not your typical Zara, or Lululemon, but an online fast-fashion website. Shein and similar websites have recently skyrocketed in popularity, outshining what once were popular retail stores. The grounds for this sudden success lie in the marketing and production that go on behind the scenes. Behind the glamorous trendy clothes and unbelievable sales, are tons of wasted clothes and unlivable working conditions with little to no pay. Shein’s luxury of being a private company manages to conceal much about the company’s production strategies, inevitably sparking a sense of inquiry. What else is Shein hiding? And what does this mean for consumers? The U.S. federal government must regulate taxing laws and fast fashion production before fast fashion’s impacts extend to irreversible environmental damage, exploitative labor practices, and unsustainable consumer habits.
The reason Shein can sustain features like cheap clothing and an endless selection of designs is by finding loopholes to save money. The most crucial aspect is their outsourcing strategy. By outsourcing from places like China or Bangladesh, Shein can save thousands of dollars and months of production time. While this may seem like a good approach, as it fosters cultural exchange and economic integration, when Shein outsources to factories from foreign countries, they demand extremely high expectations of products in a very short time, and these factories often resort to subcontracting. Subcontracting typically occurs when a factory is unable to complete a job in time, so it farms out sections of work to subfactories, these subfactories almost always have terrible working conditions and very little pay. Not only does this result in unethical labor, but many of these clothes end up in landfills due to Shein’s algorithm. By overproducing clothes, Shein can see what is most popular to customers, and they often dump what isn’t in illegal landfills. Manuel Bojorque and Kerry Breen describe the world’s largest illegal landfill of used clothing located in Chile. It is estimated to contain 30,000 tons of waste. This is just one of numerous illegal landfills around the world due to the business practices of this industry.
Additionally, when Shein and other companies outsourced orders from these places, they shipped directly to the customer, exercising the de minimis tax exemption, “a law… that allows shipments bound for American businesses and consumers valued under $800 (per person, per day) to enter the U.S. free of duty and taxes” (National Foreign Trade Council). This loophole allowed Shein to avoid significant tax rates for the large amounts of clothes they shipped every day. A 2023 report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party found that Temu and Shein are “likely responsible” for more than 30% of de minimis shipments into the U.S. (Alina Selyukh, 2024). However, as of February 1st, 2025, the Trump administration began the process of removing this exemption. Although this action is currently delayed, due to the extreme impact it would have on commerce, “Trump announced an additional 10% across-the-board tariff on all Chinese imports and ended the de minimis exemption for Chinese low-value packages that had previously entered duty-free”(Laura Gottesdiener and Stephen Eisenhammer, 2025).
This is only the first step we must take towards this industry. From here, we must address the conditions that these clothes come from by facilitating and ensuring ethically sound factory conditions. We must address the landfills to which these clothes are going by issuing cleanups and extending producer responsibility. The future of fast fashion is something that can be addressed, one step at a time.
Averie Chiang is a freshman at The Nueva School. She is interested in climate justice, particularly the deleterious effects of fast fashion. In her free time, she enjoys rowing at Norcal Crew and hiking with her scout troop.
Works Cited
Bojorquez, M., & Breen, K. (2023, December 16). Inside the landfill of fast-fashion: “These clothes don’t even come from here” – CBS News. Www.cbsnews.com. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inside-the-landfill-of-fast-fashion-chile/
Gottesdiener, L., & Eisenhammer, S. (2025, February 14). Trump closed a loophole for low-cost imports ‒ until all hell broke loose. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-closed-de-minimis-import-loophole-until-all-hell-broke-loose-2025-02-14/
Palmer, A. (2025, February 7). Trump delays cancellation of de minimis trade exemption targeting China imports. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/07/trump-delays-ending-of-de-minimis-trade-exemption-targeting-china.html
De Minimis: A Vital Tax Exemption. (n.d.). National Foreign Trade Council. https://www.nftc.org/de-minimis-a-vital-tax-exemption